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The Secret Origin of Windows

Posted by Soulskill on from the sounds-like-a-comic-book-character dept.

harrymcc writes "Windows has been so dominant for so long that it's easy to forget Windows 1.0 was vaporware, mocked both outside and inside of Microsoft — and that its immediate successors were considered stopgaps until OS/2 was everywhere. Tandy Trower, the product manager who finally got Windows 1.0 out the door a quarter century ago, has written a memoir of the experience. (He thought being assigned the much-maligned project was Microsoft's fiendish way of trying to get rid of him.) The story involves such still-significant figures as Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, and Nathan Myhrvold; Trower left Microsoft only in November of 2009 after 28 years with the company."

4 of 402 comments (clear)

  1. To be fair... by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Funny

    they also had Ballmer doing crazy commercials at that time. It was destined to do badly.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

    1. Re:To be fair... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Do the maths? Only one math is needed, a single division, and that's not really a math at all, just an arithmetic.

  2. Re:Isn't it still vaporware? by calibre-not-output · · Score: 4, Funny

    Actually the product's quality has declined quite a bit since the golden days of Windows 1.0 - now it's bloated vaporware. No wonder they've decided to invest in the cloud.

    --
    Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
  3. MS-DOSS by tepples · · Score: 4, Funny

    DOSSHELL

    And all the Mac-tards at the time would say "I thought DOS had only one S."